U.S. Government Seizes and Shutters Torrent-Finder.com

Torrent-Finder.com is down today; the site was apparently seized by government agencies for reasons unknown. In all likelihood, the site was taken down due to intellectual property concerns including copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods.

The agencies named in the notice include the Department of Justice, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of Homeland Security Investigations.

While torrenting in general is one of the seedier parts of the underbelly of the Internet, Torrent-Finder itself did not host or link to any torrents. Instead, it simply acted as a sort of torrent search engine, returning iframes with other sites that do contain torrent links.

If you’d like to see how the site works for yourself, you can check out Torrent-Finder.info, which hasn’t apparently popped up on the government’s radar yet.

This technicality was apparently not enough to keep the hounds at bay, however. Currently, the site’s homepage looks like this:

Most troubling of all, however, are statements made by the owner of Torrent-Finder.com. He told the bloggers atTorrentFreak that his site was seized “without any previous complaint or notice from any court… While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation, and they say it was totally from ICANN.”

What do you make of this site’s seizure by the U.S. government? In the struggle to protect copyrighted works, should the powers that be still have to notify site owners that their websites are in violation? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.